Today’s hi-tech innovations such as the iPad and Kindle will go from luxury
to necessity.

Over the past few years, we’ve seen a host of new technology enter our lives at an extraordinary pace. A couple of decades ago, the notion of everyone owning a mobile phone would have seemed ridiculous and extravagant. Today, there are more such phones in Britain than people.

For any new device, there’s a brief period when it’s the plaything of trendsetters with disposable income to burn. But the key moment comes when they enter the mainstream. You might have thought that tablet computers were already taking over the world one commuter at a time – but just wait until you see them in every school, every workplace and every home.

This week, Amazon unveiled the Kindle Fire, its challenger to the iPad; next week, Apple shows off the latest version of the iPhone. Both will be cooed over by technology journalists, their every feature lovingly analysed. But that’s not the point. What really matters is that, upon their release, the rest of the range will shuffle down in price.

Until this week, the basic Kindle ebook reader cost £109; today, it’s £89, and in the US, a mere £50. That makes it practically an impulse purchase, almost cheap enough to buy for everyone in a family – and to forgive its various shortcomings, such as its lack of colour and video – or for every single student in a school, providing every child with a free library containing thousands of public-domain classics such as Austen, Dickens and Shakespeare.

As for the Kindle Fire itself, it’s a little like a smaller iPad – but costs a third of the price, while still letting people surf the web, watch videos, read books, and play games. We’re already seeing iPads replace bulky manuals and textbooks in hospitals and cockpits; doubtless, the even lower price of the Kindle Fire will see it infiltrate even more workplaces. Meanwhile, the iPhone and iPad are rapidly moving from luxury to necessity – basic tools used by millions of people in their everyday life.

Of course, this process isn’t all sunshine and roses. By buying an iPad or a Kindle, you can end up locking yourself into an exclusive relationship with Apple’s or Amazon’s online stores: not only are you at their mercy as to which products they choose to stock, but you could find it impossible to move your purchases to another device later on.

But such disadvantages are more than outweighed by the sheer pace of progress. To see the features a £150 tablet computer will have in three years’ time, simply look at a top-end iPad today: video conferencing, constant high-speed wireless internet access, more storage, more speed. Imagine if every worker and student had one – it would make possible the age-old vision of a world where we can watch lectures or talk to our doctors, face-to-face, from anywhere in the world. We might even see the arrival of proper telecommuting, reversing the flight of workers and young people out of the countryside.

What’s truly amazing about technology isn’t innovation – it’s how quickly it becomes commonplace. To our children, none of the things we gush over now will seem at all surprising or impressive. Driven by our insatiable desire for more content and more entertainment, and fuelled by the gigantic factories of China and south-east Asia, we are turning the magical into the mundane with every passing day.